lection years have much in common. They produce a profusion of punditry, media attention, and politically
expedient action, quickly forgotten, and with little lasting impact. But not
always; sometimes events are set into motion that have long lifetimes. This
was the case in 1976 when, as in 1992, an incumbent Republican president
faced a strong challenge from the right wing of his own party. Then (as last
year) sops were offered to placate the far right and, while it is too early
to know which of the 1992 capers will endure, we now know a great deal about
one of the most political events of 1976, and its remarkably long-lasting
effects on U.S. policy.

Late last year, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) released
the 1976 "Team B" reports. Team B was an experiment in competitive
threat assessments approved by then-Director of Central Intelligence George
Bush. Teams of "outside experts" were to take independent looks at
the highly classified data used by the intelligence community to assess
Soviet strategic forces in the yearly National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs).
NIEs are authoritative and are widely circulated within the government. U.S. national security policy on various issues as well as the defense budget are
based on their general conclusions. Although NIEs represent the collective
judgment of the entire intelligence community, the lead agency is the CIA.

There were three "B" teams. One studied Soviet
low-altitude air defense capabilities, one examined Soviet intercontinental
ballistic missile (ICBM) accuracy, and one investigated Soviet strategic
policy and objectives. But it is the third team, chaired by Harvard professor
Richard Pipes, that ultimately received considerable
publicity and is commonly referred to as Team B.

The Team B experiment was concocted by conservative cold
warriors determined to bury détente and the SALT process. Panel members were
all hard-liners. The experiment was leaked to the press in an unsuccessful
attempt at an "October surprise." But most important, the Team B
reports became the intellectual foundation of "the window of
vulnerability" and of the massive arms buildup that began toward the end
of the Carter administration and accelerated under President Reagan.

How did the Team B notion come about? In 1974, Albert
Wohlstetter, a professor at the University of Chicago, accused the CIA of
systematically underestimating Soviet missile deployment, and conservatives
began a concerted attack on the CIA's annual assessment of the Soviet threat.
This assessment--the NIE--was an obvious target.

In the mid-1970s, the CIA was vulnerable on three counts. First,
it was still reeling from the 1975 congressional hearings about covert
assassination attempts on foreign leaders and other activities. Second, it
was considered "payback time" by hard-liners, who were still
smarting from the CIA's realistic assessments during the Vietnam war
years--assessments that failed to see light at the end of the tunnel. And
finally, between 1973 and 1976, there were four different directors of
central intelligence, in contrast to the more stately progression of four
directors in the preceding 20 years.

The vehicle chosen from within the administration to challenge
the CIA was the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB).
Formed as the Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Affairs by
President Eisenhower in 1956, PFIAB was reconstituted by President Kennedy in
1961 after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Members are appointed by the
president but hold no other government positions (except possibly on other
advisory committees or panels). By 1975, PFIAB was a home for such
conservatives as William Casey, John Connally, John Foster, Clare Booth Luce,
and Edward Teller.

The PFIAB first raised the issue of competitive threat
assessments in 1975, but Director of Central Intelligence William Colby was
able to ward them off, partly on procedural grounds (an NIE was in progress).
But Colby, a career CIA officer, also said, "It is hard for me to
envisage how an ad hoc 'independent' group of government and non-government
analysts could prepare a more thorough, comprehensive assessment of Soviet
strategic capabilities--even in two specific areas--than the intelligence
community can prepare." [1]

At a September 1975 meeting of CIA, National Security Council,
and PFIAB staff, the deputy for National Intelligence Officers, George A.
Carver, noted that since John Foster and Edward Teller, the principal PFIAB
members pushing for the alternative assessment, disagreed with some of the
judgments made by the intelligence community, "the PFIAB proposal could
be construed as recommending the establishment of another organization which
might reach conclusions more compatible with their thinking."

In 1976, when George Bush became the new director of central
intelligence, the PFIAB lost no time in renewing its request for competitive
threat assessments. Although his top analysts argued against such an undertaking,
Bush checked with the White House, obtained an O.K., and by May 26 signed off
on the experiment with the notation, "Let her fly!! O.K. G.B."
[2] Why in the world did the Ford administration, gearing up for an
election campaign, put prominent outside critics of the CIA on the agency's
payroll, give them free access to the classified material, data, and files
they requested, and not foresee how damaging the resulting study could be?

By spring 1976, President Ford was in deep political trouble. A
January poll showed that his performance had a 46 percent disapproval rating.
The president attributed much of the dissatisfaction to the increasing
criticism of détente by a conservative coalition in both parties. Moreover,
at the time the Soviet Union and Cuba were actively
supporting the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, while the U.S.
Senate had barred further covert American support to the other contenders.

Nevertheless, early in January 1976 President Ford defended the
policy of détente he had inherited from Richard Nixon and said in an NBC News interview: "I think it
would be very unwise for a President--me or anyone else--to abandon détente.
I think détente is in the best interest of this country. It is in the best
interest of world stability, world peace." [3]

But then came the February 24 New Hampshire primary, and
President Ford nosed out challenger Ronald Reagan by only one percent-age
point. Reagan began to step up his attacks on the "Ford-Kissinger"
foreign policy, claiming that the United States had been permitted
to slide into second place and that the Soviet Union was taking advantage
of détente at the expense of American prestige and security.

In March, three important events took place. During an
interview, President Ford abruptly banished the word "détente" from
his political vocabulary, much to the surprise of the White House staff.
"We are going to forget the use of the word détente," the president
said. "What happens in the negotiations . . . are the things that are of
consequence." [4] Then, at a lunch at WashingtonD.C.'s Metropolitan Club,
Richard Allen, Max Kampelman, Paul Nitze, Eugene Rostow, and Elmo Zumwalt,
all well-known hawks opposed to détente, agreed to form the "Committee
on the Present Danger" (CPD) to alert the public to the "growing
Soviet threat." The first draft of the committee's initial statement was
circulated to its members within a month. Finally, on March 23, Ronald Reagan
won the North Carolina primary--only the
third time in U.S. history that a
challenger had defeated an incumbent president in a primary. He went on to
win the Nebraska and Texas primaries as well.

By now, conservative critics in full swing kept up a steady cry
of alarm. Paul Nitze, a CPD and Team B member, testified before the Joint
Committee on Defense Production that the Soviet Union was conducting a
massive civil defense program that would give it a bargaining edge in the
then-deadlocked arms talks. Retired Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lt.
Gen. Daniel Graham, also a Team B member, wrote in the September 1976 Reader's Digest: "The Soviets
have not built up their forces, as we have, merely to deter a nuclear war.
They build their forces to fight a nuclear war and [they] see an enormous
persuasive power accruing to a nation which can face the prospect of nuclear
war with confidence in its survival."

A January 21, 1976, Library of Congress report, "The
U.S./Soviet Military Balance, a Frame of Reference for Congress,"
identified a strong shift in the quantitative military balance toward the Soviet Union over the past 10
years. And the CIA itself revised its estimate of Soviet military spending to
10-15 percent of Soviet gross national product (GNP), as compared to 6-8
percent in previous NIEs. The revision was immediate news.

(This jump did not indicate any great increase in Soviet
military spending nor did it change the Pentagon's estimates of actual Soviet
troops, tanks, and missiles. Indeed, it reflected the judgment that the
Soviet military sector was less efficient than previously believed and
therefore the military's economic burden on the Soviet Union was greater than
earlier estimates indicated. None of this meant a greater threat to the United States. However, such
distinctions, usually made in the next to last paragraph of a long article,
were lost on the public, and the message seemed to be that the Russians were
spending more on defense and therefore we should too.)

In the summer of 1976, President Ford was rearranging priorities
in much the same erratic way as George Bush did 16 years later in an effort
to stave off conservative critics. Even the signing of the Peaceful Nuclear
Explosions Treaty was delayed from May 12 to May 28 because of panic at
Ford's loss to Ronald Reagan in the Nebraska primary.

In July 1976, Director of Central Intelligence George Bush let a
PFIAB subcommittee suggest members of the three B teams; in August he wrote
to the president that "morale at the CIA is improving." [5]

Each B team met in September and October and exchanged drafts with
their CIA counterparts during October. The first press leak occurred two days
after the first meeting of the CIA and Team B members who were examining
Soviet strategic policy and objectives. William Beecher's story in the
October 20 Boston Globe
contained leaks by at least one Team B member who conveyed to the journalist
only his recommendations, not those of his fellow panelists. According to Leo
Cherne, then chairman of PFIAB, Director of Central Intelligence Bush was
aghast at the leak and stormed into the OldExecutiveBuilding accusing members of
PFIAB of being the leakers. Cherne assured Bush that this was not the case,
and that "members of PFIAB were sufficiently smart to recognize that any
publicity would invalidate what had been a serious effort." [6] The story was not picked up and seemed to fade from
view.

However, after the Democrats won the election and
President-elect Jimmy Carter had ignored Bush's hint that up to now, CIA
directors had not changed with an incoming administration, George Bush, the
foe of leaks, agreed to meet with David Binder of the New York Times. The same director who
wrote to President Ford in August 1976, "I want to get the CIA off the
front pages and at some point out of the papers altogether," now made
sure that Team B would become front-page news. [7]

On Sunday, December 26, the lead New York Times story was about Team B. Bush appeared on Meet the Press, and three separate
congressional committees vowed to hold hearings on the whole exercise.
Although officials within the new Carter administration paid scant attention
to the Team B reports, the spadework had been done. In particular, the Pipes
panel's major conclusions had been publicly and repeatedly aired.

Meanwhile, back in November, nine days after the presidential
election, the Committee on the Present Danger issued its founding statement,
"Common Sense and the Common Danger." "The principal threat to
our nation, to world peace and to the cause of human freedom is the Soviet
drive for dominance based upon an unparalleled military buildup. . . . The Soviet Union has not altered its
long held goal of a world dominated from a single center--Moscow." If this
sounded similar to the conclusions of Richard Pipes's Team B panel, it was
hardly surprising; panel members Paul Nitze, Richard Pipes, and William Van
Cleave had leading roles in the committee.

Even before the Team B report was officially presented to PFIAB,
Pipes was eager to publicize its findings. He opened a December 7 meeting by
discussing the possibility of declassifying the report. After the CIA
rejected declassification, Pipes said that "he would urge PFIAB to make
the Team B report available to as large an audience as possible. If his
appeal to PFIAB were rejected . . . he mentioned . . . the publication of
articles on the general subject of the report without reference to classified
information. . . . Pipes also raised the possibility of using the Freedom of
Information Act to get the report into the public domain." [8]

It took 16 years before Pipes's hopes were fully realized and
the documents published. In February 1989, I filed a Freedom of Information
Act request to obtain Team B documents. After repeated letters, phone calls,
and an interview by the chairman of the Intelligence Council produced only two
items, I filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court in July 1992. By the
first meeting before the judge in September 1992, counsel for the CIA
promised that I would receive all the documents before the end of October.
The CIA deposited the Team B report at the National Archive, and delivered to
me most of the documents I had requested before the end of October 1992.

Today, the Team B reports recall the stridency and militancy of
the conservatives in the 1970s. Team B accused the CIA of consistently underestimating
the "intensity, scope, and implicit threat" posed by the Soviet
Union by relying on technical or "hard" data rather than
"contemplat[ing] Soviet strategic objectives in terms of the Soviet
conception of 'strategy' as well as in light of Soviet history, the structure
of Soviet society, and the pronouncements of Soviet leaders."

And when Team B looked at "hard" data, everywhere it
saw the worst case. It reported, for instance, that the Backfire bomber
"probably will be produced in substantial numbers, with perhaps 500
aircraft off the line by early 1984." (In fact, the Soviets had 235 in
1984.) Team B also regarded Soviet defenses with alarm. "Mobile ABM
[anti-ballistic missiles] system components combined with the deployed SAM
[surface-to-air missile] system could produce a significant ABM
capability." But that never occurred.

Team B found the Soviet Union immune from Murphy's
law. They examined ABM and directed energy research, and said,
"Understanding that there are differing evaluations of the
potentialities of laser and CPB [charged particle beam] for ABM, it is still clear that the Soviets have mounted
ABM efforts in both areas of a magnitude that it is difficult to overestimate."
(Emphasis in original.)

But overestimate they did. A facility at the Soviet Union's
nuclear test range in Semipalatinsk was touted by Gen. George Keegan, Chief
of Air Force Intelligence (and a Team B briefer), as a site for tests of
Soviet nuclear-powered beam weapons. In fact, it was used to test
nuclear-powered rocket engines. According to a Los Alamos physicist who
recently toured Russian directed-energy facilities, "We had
overestimated both their capability and their [technical]
understanding."

Team B's failure to find a Soviet non-acoustic anti-submarine
system was evidence that there could well be one. "The implication could
be that the Soviets have, in fact, deployed some operational non-acoustic
systems and will deploy more in the next few years." It wasn't a
question of if the Russians were coming. They were here. (And probably
working at the CIA!)

When Team B looked at the "soft" data concerning
Soviet strategic concepts, they slanted the evidence to support their
conclusions. In asserting that "Russian, and especially Soviet political
and military theories are distinctly offensive
in character," Team B claimed "their ideal is the 'science of
conquest' (nauka pobezhdat)
formulated by the eighteenth-century Russian commander, Field Marshal A.V.
Suvorov in a treatise of the same name, which has been a standard text of
Imperial as well as Soviet military science." Raymond Garthoff, a senior
fellow at the Brookings Institution, has pointed out that the correct
translation of nauka pobezhdat
is "the science of winning" or the "science of victory."
All military strategists strive for a winning strategy. Our own military
writings are devoted to winning victories, but this is not commonly viewed as
a policy of conquest.

Team B hurled another brickbat: the CIA consistently
underestimated Soviet military expenditures. With the advantage of hindsight,
we now know that Soviet military spending increases began to slow down
precisely as Team B was writing about "an intense military buildup in
nuclear as well as conventional forces of all sorts, not moderated either by
the West's self-imposed restraints or by SALT." In 1983, then-deputy
director of the CIA, Robert Gates, testified: "The rate of growth of
overall defense costs is lower because procurement of military hardware--the
largest category of defense spending--was almost flat in 1976-1981 . . . [and
that trend] appears to have continued also in 1982 and 1983."

While Team B waxed eloquent about "conceptual
failures," it was unable to grasp how the future might differ from the
past. In 1976 mortality rates were rising for the
entire Soviet population, and life expectancies, numbers of new labor
entrants, and agricultural output were all declining. Yet Team B wrote
confidently, "Within what is, after all, a large and expanding GNP . . .
Soviet strategic forces have yet to reflect
any constraining effect of civil economy competition, and are unlikely to do
so in the foreseeable future." (Emphasis in original.) And
When Ronald Reagan got elected, Team B became, in
essence, the "A Team."

For more than a third of a century, perceptions about U.S. national security
were colored by the view that the Soviet Union was on the road to
military superiority over the United States. Neither Team B nor
the multibillion dollar intelligence agencies could see that the Soviet Union was dissolving from
within.

For more than a third of a century, assertions of Soviet
superiority created calls for the United States to
"rearm." In the 1980s, the call was heeded so thoroughly that the United States embarked on a
trillion-dollar defense buildup. As a result, the country neglected its
schools, cities, roads and bridges, and health care system. From the world's
greatest creditor nation, the United States became the world's
greatest debtor--in order to pay for arms to counter the threat of a nation
that was collapsing.

1. William E. Colby to President Ford (Nov. 21, 1975), author
collection. Obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by Anne H. Cahn.

Anne Hessing Cahn, a visiting scholar at the Center for
International Studies at the University of Maryland in College Park, is a
former official at the U.S. Arms Control and
Disarmament Agency and the Defense Department.